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Troubleshooting

Browser dependencies​

Playwright does self-inspection every time it runs to make sure the browsers can be launched successfully. If there are missing dependencies, playwright will print instructions to acquire them.

See also in the Command line tools which has a command to install all necessary dependencies automatically for Ubuntu LTS releases.

Incompatible Microsoft Edge / Google Chrome policy settings​

It's known that Playwright is not working as expected when some Microsoft Edge / Google Chrome policy settings are set. The following shows some of them, there might be more that affect Playwright's functionalities. If you find any other policy settings that break functionality, please file an issue and we'll add it to this document. You can see a list of applied policies by running chrome://policy in the browser.

  • UserDataDir - This policy is used to specify the location of the user data directory. Playwright uses a temporary directory for user data, so this policy is not compatible with Playwright. See discussion in this bug.
  • ExtensionInstallForcelist - This policy is used to specify a list of extensions that should be installed. Playwright's browser close will not work if this policy is set. See discussion in this bug.

Python requirements​

Playwright requires Python 3.7 or newer.

WebKit Web Inspector​

Launching WebKit Inspector during the execution will prevent the Playwright script from executing any further and will reset pre-configured user agent and device emulation.

This is a known limitation.

System requirements​

The browser binaries for Chromium, Firefox and WebKit work across the 3 platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux):

Windows​

Works with Windows and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

macOS​

Requires 11 (Big Sur) or above.

Linux​

Depending on your Linux distribution, you might need to install additional dependencies to run the browsers.

note

Only Debian 11, Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 are officially supported.

See also in the Command line tools which has a command to install all necessary dependencies automatically for Ubuntu LTS releases.